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McSleepy developer uses "KIS" to increase precision and safety of intubation
April 18, 2011
First there was McSleepy™. Now it’s time to introduce the first intubation robot operated by remote control. This robotic system named The Kepler Intubation System (KIS), and developed by Dr.

A colleague described a recent meeting at his hospital by saying that five years ago, most of the physicians in the room had been like him, independent owners of small group practices. Now a majority were employees of the hospital.
“I’m a dying breed,” he said, “and it’s getting harder to survive.

I was asked to see a 95 year old lady with severe abdominal pain a few weeks ago. She had been admitted to the hospital with complaints of fatigue and chest palpitations. Suddenly one morning she developed severe, sharp abdominal pain. Her heart was racing in the 130's. The Xray technicians were just leaving her room when I arrived.

A unique material tries to find its way into the hands of the brave rescue workers fighting to prevent Japan’s nuclear crisis.
April 13, 2011
Exposure to ionizing radiation is believed to be dangerous for humans. The rays or particles can damage human tissue based on the exposure; typically, the more radiation, the more damage.

As medicine adapts to the 21st century, new specialties arise. General surgery is seeing two new fields emerge. One is “Acute Care Surgery,” which encompasses three facets of general surgery—emergency surgery, critical care and trauma care. The other is the concept of a surgical hospitalist.

St. Joseph Hospital focused on universal use when choosing the imaging equipment for its hybrid suite.
While every facility’s experience building a hybrid OR will be unique to them, learning from others who have completed their project, or are in the midst of it, can help facilitate the process.

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. (attributed)
- Pericles
Before I went to medical school, I worked as an orderly in a private hospital. It was not glamorous work, but I loved the people.

Ryerson biomedical engineering students Michal Prywata and Thiago Caires' prosthetic arm is controlled by brain signals, which is a first in medical prosthetics.
Two Ryerson University undergraduate biomedical engineering students are changing the world of medical prosthetics with a newly developed prosthetic arm that is controlled by brain signals.

Recently, I saw a young friend who is training to be a surgeon. Extremely bright and the recipient of numerous medical school awards for her work with patients, she had been anxious as a student about the grueling hours she would face once she began working as a junior surgeon on the wards.
Now she was laughing over those old fears.

An estimated 500,000 health care workers are exposed to electrosurgical, or laser smoke, annually1, also subjecting them to the toxic gases, vapors, bioaerosols and viruses that have been found within it.
Considering the hazards of surgical smoke, it is hard to ignore the importance of wearing proper facial protection.

Recently, a colleague lamented a change she had noticed among the young doctors at her hospital. “They are always in front of the hospital computers,” she said. “I never see them with patients, but I can always find them sitting at a terminal.”
She paused for a moment, then added uncomfortably: “These days I probably spend as much time looking at the office computer as I do looking at patients.

More than twice as many lungs and nearly 50 percent more kidneys could be recovered for transplant operations if intensive care physicians were to work with organ procurement organization (OPO) coordinators to monitor and manage donor bodies after brain death has occurred, according to an analysis by UPMC and University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine physicians that is now in the online version of the American Journal of Transplantation.

I remember being told by a surgeon, while I was in medical school, that "you're not a real doctor until you've killed someone." I thought at the time (and still think) that there was a puerile bravado behind that admonition, but there is also a grain of truth. I have my own graveyard. Curiously, not all of its inhabitants are dead.

When a surgeon is considering an implant, whether it be a synthetic implant or allograft tissue – transplant tissue from another human – there are multiple factors that the surgeon has to consider.
The first and foremost is: What is the reason that the surgeon is using the implant? What goals does the surgeon want to achieve with implant of that particular material? For instance, if the surgeon is putting metal screws and rods into somebody’s back, , the question is, what is the benefit that screw and rod? What is it going to achieve for that patient? In the case of spine surgery, oftentimes, that means you’re restoring stability to the spine.